


Decennial Chris

by Zeke Black (istia)



Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Angst, Cliche Bingo Challenge, M/M, Old West, POV Chris Larabee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-06
Updated: 2009-08-06
Packaged: 2017-10-02 11:22:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/istia/pseuds/Zeke%20Black
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris's life at ten-year markers. Written for the 2009 Cliche Bingo prompt: <em>Another year older: Birthdays</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Decennial Chris

###### 1

When Chris Larabee was two years old, he crawled with his wooden pony too close to the fire one November day, and, when his big sister Emmy yelled at him and he turned to look at her, his shirt caught fire. Sometimes he woke from a dream of terror like a black beast, of pain like claws and a dark void echoing with screams, but he wasn't sure if it was a true memory or one made up out of the stories his family later told.

He didn't remember his ma not letting him out of her sight for a week after snatching him away from the fire. He didn't remember her clutching him after they'd pulled off his charred shirt and washed the burn on his back and put cool salve on it; had no recollection of sobs shaking them both or tears wetting his head like baptism. He didn't remember her taking him with her into every room she hurried between while doing the daily chores during the following days, and out to the barn and around the fields and, on the weekly shopping trip into town, into every store with her instead of letting Emmy play with him in the street. He knew these things happened only through the rest of the family's memory.

His own clearest memory was of his pa's later teasing of both him and his ma about his ma's insistence on even taking Chris to sleep with them, till his pa'd put his foot down because he'd been afraid he might roll over one night and smother the brat. He always reached out to pull Chris's tow-colored forelock at that point in the story, so Chris would know he was joshing, and Chris would grin back at him and duck the swipe, having the timing down perfectly by the time he was eight.

He didn't think he remembered his ma tying a long strip of soft linen around his wrist and the other end to the fence around the vegetable garden when she was working outside, but, being told about it later, he reckoned that was maybe the start of his chafing at any kind of prison.

The only time Chris thought about the hand-sized scar of wrinkled skin on his right shoulder blade was when a bedmate paid it some mind, with a scratch of nails around the edges or a swipe of a curious tongue; or a searing kiss to the heart of it.

 

###### 2

When he was twelve, Chris spent a June morning helping out with the Hightowlers' windmill, hammering boards between the lower struts alongside Reuben and Lem while Mr. Hightowler oiled the mechanism, braced high above them with his feet stretched between slats, a haloed black silhouette against the sun when Chris squinted up. He didn't notice the faint scent of smoke on the breeze till his little brother Joel ran up yelling his name. By the time Chris raced home through the fields of new corn, the smokehouse behind the house was fully ablaze. His ma's screams had him rushing toward it nonetheless when a strong hand thrust him so hard to the side he sprawled in the dirt. His pa's long legs covered the ground in moments and he tore at the wedged door--warped in the last rain, and he and his pa had it on the list to fix, just hadn't got around to it yet--and wrenched it open and reached inside just as the hut collapsed.

He remembered the dryness of desperation in his mouth as he ran between the trough in the corral and the burning shack with bucket after bucket of water, and the flood of relief when Mr. Hightowler was suddenly beside him with Reuben, the two of them helping until the ruin was just a smoldering heap. He remembered Emmy's sobs that went on long after his ma's screams stopped and the shock of silence when Mrs. Hightowler arrived and pulled Emmy to her. He remembered Joel's trembling as he clutched Chris's pant leg, and how sharp and hard the colors of everything looked.

Mostly, though, Chris remembered the caw of a crow as it launched itself from a branch of the catalpa tree his ma had planted, drawing Chris's eyes up from death to follow the sweep of black wings against the sky to its landing in the corral near the feed trough, where it pecked at the ground for leavings as though nothing that mattered had happened just a few feet away. Chris had wanted to grab a rock and fling it; had wanted, in truth, to fling a dozen rocks and hit the crow dead-on with every one of them until it was a smashed mess of bone and meat and feathers.

But he'd noticed the way its head constantly turned, checking all around for danger between peckings, its little hops as it changed position, its readiness to flee. He saw with abrupt clarity the vast fearsome uncertainty of its world: and the need to hurt something because he was hurting died in Chris.

His ma's cousin took them in after the burial and the sale of the farm. Farming folk down Hartford City way, hard-working, decent; they even encouraged Chris to take an extra year of schooling. Emmy married a local farmer when she was seventeen and settled down happily, and Joel bloomed. Chris stuck around until he was sixteen, then hired himself out for any job that took him generally west and south, eventually into Indian Territory and beyond; the more dangerous the better for the thrill of being alive.

 

###### 3

At the ripe old age of twenty-two, Chris woke up after a four-day drunk with a black eye, two missing teeth, the knuckles on both hands swollen to bitching hell and aching like an old geezer's rheumatic joints, and scratch marks festering up and down his back. He turned his head on the pillow of the Poplar Bluff hotel room and squinted a look at Ella Gaines, sleeping peaceful as sin beside him, and reckoned it was time to stop walking the knife edge over the flames if he wanted to keep living.

Nothing in his bitching life yet had made him ready to surrender, and Ella sure as hell didn't have the power to change him that much.

Ella raised a ruckus, as only Ella could, when he shoved his gear into his saddlebags and said he was heading off alone, but he'd never had trouble sticking with a decision once he'd made it; never had trouble leaving people behind when he needed to move on, either. He tossed his saddlebags over his shoulder, took Ella's pointed chin in one hand and kissed her a final time with a flourish, dancing away with a laugh when she bit viciously at his tongue. He tipped his hat with a grin and strode out, ignoring her strident voice yelling his name, among a few other choice things, after him.

He moved continually for the next few months, switching directions, wandering at will; partly to make sure Ella, tenacious and clever as she was, wouldn't be able to follow him, but mostly from the still burning need to see over the next hill and through the next canyon. He camped out alone, counting stars in the huge empty awash in silence, and took whatever company offered in towns when he wanted it, ignoring it when he didn't, free to call his own shots. In Diamond Springs, when a fair gunfight threatened to turn instead into Chris alone against three, he met Buck Wilmington, who appeared at his back like a genie with a charming smile and watchful eyes, lean and lanky and as at home with the Colt at his hip as Chris was.

He and Buck met up a lot after that; traveled together some, parted ways occasionally to pursue some goal of their own, only to find each other again like a damned magnet and true north. After a few years, Chris reckoned it wasn't bad having one constant in his life after all.

 

###### 4

Shortly after his thirty-second birthday, Chris arrived home triumphant and happy from a horse-selling trip to Mexico with Buck and found his house a charred skeleton, grotesque in the brilliant sunshine. Nothing remained intact on the solid stone foundation he'd built to protect his family, only ashes and scorched beams, and the stink in the air was unmistakable. He flung himself into the wreckage anyway, scrabbling in the still-smoking ashes, hot beneath the surface, until he found the blistered remains of his wife and son. Neither was recognizable, except for the bigger body being wrapped entirely around the smaller. He and Buck dug one grave. Chris wrapped Sarah and Adam together in the bright Mexican blanket he'd thought might appeal to Sarah as a cover for their bed. He took the other presents he'd brought out of his saddlebag and unwrapped them with shaking hands, tucking the turquoise necklace next to Sarah's blackened head and laying the bright, gaudy Jumping Jack on top of the fused bodies.

He couldn't really see what he was doing by then, but he knew the feel of Buck's big hands on his upper arms. He let Buck pull him back, let Buck fold the blanket back over the bodies and tuck it in like a goodnight kiss; let Buck finish tying the rope around the inhumanly small bundle. Chris didn't need to see clearly to help Buck lower the bodies into the grave or to shovel dirt in or to plant the two small crosses they'd made firmly into the newly packed soil.

He didn't notice the burns on his hands until Buck forced him to sit on the grass so Buck could tend to them. Buck said nothing, just bent close in grim silence, eyes harder than Chris had ever seen them, but touch as gentle as Sarah's would've been.

Chris turned away to spew up his breakfast, amazed only that he'd kept it down this long. He pushed away from Buck, getting up unsteadily to dig the bottle of whiskey out of Buck's saddlebag. Cheap Mexican rotgut; perfect. He rinsed out his mouth, then took several long swallows before pouring a stream over each burnt hand in turn. It hurt bitching enough to make him growl, but the pain in his hands was a whisper to the howl in his head. He knotted bandannas around each hand with his teeth just to keep the blood from being a nuisance.

He refused to leave until he'd completely fenced in the vulnerable grave. Buck gritted his teeth, but kept his silence and worked beside him as Chris fumbled boards with his aching hands and wouldn't stop until it was done. When they finally left the homestead, Buck shadowed him for months, until Chris finally succeeded in driving him away and slipped off alone into the landscape.

Three years later, when he turned his trail toward a remote town called Four Corners, aware Buck was there and ready to hazard having a little constancy in his life again, Chris knew that while caring was the most fearsome danger life offered a man, not having anything to care about was worse.

 

###### 5

When Chris was forty-two, a wagon set ablaze and sent careening behind a terrified horse down Four Corners' main street by a gang of would-be bank robbers crashed into the boardwalk in front of the Saloon just as Ezra Standish was exiting. As Chris yelled something incoherent even to himself and surged up from behind the cover of a barrel, he barely felt the hard body that crashed into him from the side, flattening him to the ground. All he could see was the fireball that had erupted from a powder keg in the back of the wagon, and all he felt were hands trying to restrain him.

He fought back until Vin Tanner's voice yelling in his ear penetrated: "Fucking hell, Chris, goddammit, he's all right!"

He didn't let Ezra out of his sight for the next week. He ignored Ezra's reactions like the buzz of a bluebottle, from his initial impatience through spluttering exasperation. Ezra was hard to ignore, though, when Chris followed him up to his room on a Wednesday afternoon and Ezra simultaneously kicked the door shut and slammed him up against the wall. Chris blinked down at the hands pushing hard against his chest, bunched in his jacket, then into Ezra's enraged face and narrowed eyes. Ezra's nostrils flared as he took a deep breath before speaking.

"Are you _trying_ to get us both hung as sodomites?" Ezra didn't so much speak as hiss. "Because you are doing an excellent job of achieving just that objective! And it stops now, Chris. Do you hear me?"

Chris broke Ezra's hold on his jacket. "I ain't bitching deaf, Ezra."

Ezra flung up his hands. "Well, it's hard to tell since you've been doing a damned fine imitation of it for the past week!"

Ezra pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he told Chris in a flinty voice, accent exaggerated the way it became when he was annoyed, that he, Ezra, was leaving town for a week or so, however long he damned well deemed necessary to keep them safe, and Chris was staying here. Chris took an unsteady breath and sank down on the bed. He swallowed hard, but nodded. When Ezra, breathing out a sigh close above him, laid a hand against Chris's cheek, warm and vital and achingly familiar, Chris closed his eyes and leaned into its support.

He'd once reckoned his bravest acts were getting out of bed every day after losing Sarah and Adam. He held to that thought right up till the day he sat on the boardwalk and let Ezra ride out of town alone.

 

###### 6

At age fifty-two, Chris came home one scorching afternoon hot, sooty and sweaty from burning out stumps in the new north pasture with Vin's and Buck's help. He walked inside his shack, after seeing them off back to town, to find water heating on the stove and the zinc tub set out ready for him in the bedroom. He grinned, shucked his clothes, poured hot water into the waiting cold, and slid his sore body in with a groan.

Ezra came in from the barn ten minutes later. He clucked at Chris's heap of filthy clothes as he kicked them into the corner, then knelt and slid a hand along Chris's chest and down his arm to take the soap from him. Ezra washed his back, strong hands firm and sure, but soothing as a childhood dream. Chris let his head fall forward, relaxing, feeling the aches flow away. When Ezra slid a soapy hand down Chris's belly and took hold of his cock, Chris curled a dripping arm around Ezra's neck and pulled him in for a kiss as heated and exhilarating as their lives together all these years.

Later, at the press of Ezra's lips to the rippled scar on his shoulder blade, Chris's come spurted over his fingers as though he'd never known a weary moment in his life.


End file.
